President Bashar al-Assad said Sunday the intellectual war and attempts to abolish or replace identity are one of the gravest aspects of the colonial aggression targeting Syria.

President al-Assad was speaking during a meeting with the teaching staff and post-graduate students at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Damascus.

The Arab region is originally based on an ideology of correlation between Arabism and Islam, the President said, “which makes adherence to this principle one of the most important factors for restoring intellectual and social security to Arab societies.”

The West has sought to abolish this ideology so as to dominate the region and the role of Arab countries. Having failed to do so, the President said, the West turned to play on concepts to alter the essence of the ideology.

President al-Assad said the intellectuals and academics have a role

to *look into concepts and furnish them with clear-cut meanings*

to confront attempts to market different meanings that seek to empty ideologies of their content,”

which risks a loss of belonging and

deviation from principles. . .for which we have been struggling for decades.”

Syria is targeted, not only for its weighty geopolitical position, but also for its pivotal role in the region and the sway it has on the Arab street, the President said.

He indicated that the war against Syria is an attempt to control its sovereign decision and have it weakened

to reverse its policies that meet the aspirations of the Syrian people and

are out of pace with the US [World Tyrant] and Western [NATO] interests in the region which, the President said,

explains the emergence of the [Puppet] Israeli factor that has a major role in backing terrorist groups.

President al-Assad said the crisis in Syria is passing through a turning point

on the military side due to the continuous achievements of the army and armed forces in the war against terrorism, and

on the social front in terms of national reconciliations and a growing popular awareness of the aggression’s goals.

The Syrian state seeks to restore security and stability to the main areas rocked by terrorism before turning to strike pockets and dormant cells.

There had been dialogue during the meeting about the importance of universities, as well as scientific and strategic studies’ research centers in providing the state with qualified cadres.

As Rebecca Gordon notes in her new book, *Mainstreaming Torture*, polls find greater support in the United States [The World Tyrant] for torture now than when Bush was president. And it’s not hard to see why that would be the case.

Fifteen years ago, it was possible to pretend the U.S. government [The World Tyrant] opposed torture. Then it became widely known that the government tortured. And it was believed (with whatever accuracy) that officials had tried to keep the torturing secret. Next it became clear that nobody would be punished, that in fact top officials responsible for torture would be permitted to openly defend what they had done as good and noble.

The idea was spread around that the torture was stopping, but the cynical could imagine it must be continuing in secret, the partisan could suppose the halt was only temporary, the trusting could assume torture would be brought back as needed, and the attentive could be and have been aware that the government has *gone right on torturing to this day* with no end in sight.

Anyone who bases their morality on what their government does (or how Hollywood supports it) might be predicted to have moved in the direction of supporting torture.

Gordon’s book, like most others, speaks of torture as being largely in the past —-even while admitting that it isn’t really. “Bush administration-era policies” are acknowledged to be ongoing, and yet somehow they retain the name “Bush administration-era policies,” and discussion of their possible prosecution in a court of law does not consider the control that the *current chief perpetrator* has over law enforcement and his obvious preference not to see a predecessor prosecuted for something he’s doing.

Attorney James Connell has visited his client inside the secret Guantanamo prison complex known as Camp 7 only once, taken in a van with covered windows on a circuitous trek to disguise the route on the scrub brush-and-cactus covered military base.

It is not clear whether one visit closely monitored by prison authorities would reveal the cause of [Ramzi] Binalshibh’s distress.

His previous military lawyers, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier and Lt. Richard Federico, were allowed inside Camp 7 in November 2008 for about two hours.

With Connell, they are the only other defense lawyers known to have ever been inside the facility. They could not determine a cause for his complaints.

The secrecy and security, Lachelier recalls, seemed excessive then and she remains skeptical.

“There’s no way to explain the security measures that they use from the perspective of the safety of the guards or the safety of the detainees, beyond that they must be hiding something.”

A communique from the IMF’s finance committee urged [The World Tyrant’s] Congress to use the coming months to enact the reforms, which would also double the IMF’s permanent lending authority.

Nearly all the IMF’s other members have approved the reform legislation, but the U.S. [The World Tyrant] is the IMF’s largest voting member and has blocked it from taking effect so far.

But the communique made clear that the IMF will not tolerate a delay of the reforms, first negotiated in 2010, for much longer.

“If the 2010 reforms are not ratified by year-end, we will call on the IMF to build on its existing work and develop options for next steps [expulsion of The World Tyrant?] and we will schedule a discussion of these options,” the communique said.